Jazz (by Toni Morrison)

One of the more deceptively accessible Morrison books I've read. Rhythmic, of course; I'd love to hear it read aloud. Interesting themes: solidarity, collusion, obsession, eros vs. agape, absolution, community, culture... this book is about relationships in the richest and most complicated sense, I think. Joe and Violet, Violet and Alice Manfred, Golden Grey and True Belle, Dorcas and Anton... all kinds of relationships within a community that seems stronger than any of the individual relationships themselves. The community absorbs all enmity within itself and ultimately fosters a surprising sense of understanding. Maybe that makes no sense, but it's the closest I can get to it.

My only "criticism" is that I wish the reader got more insight into Joe's motives for killing Dorcas. (Not a spoiler; this is on the first page. Maybe that explanation on the first page is the best we're going to get.)

The narrative technique is interesting. It breaks in throughout the story but somehow it isn't intrusive. (I often find the breaking in of a narrator to be intrusive.) It's the storytelling tradition and background, of course, but with no awkwardness. Yet it's mysterious, too. The narrator at the beginning seemed to be an anonymous resident of the city. The narrator at the end seemed to be God. Maybe the beauty of Morrison's book is that the two are so easy to conflate.

"So from Lenox to St. Nicholas and across 135th Street, Lexington, from Convent to Eighth I could hear the men playing out their maple-sugar hearts, tapping it from four-hundred-year-old trees and letting it run down the trunk, wasting it because they didn't have a bucket to hold it and didn't want one either. They just wanted to let it run that day, slow if it wished, or fast, but a free run down trees bursting to give it up." (Page 196-7)